Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams Wants You to Move Past Black Mirror

There's a cost to being so massively influential that you disappear under your imitators. Philip K. Dick invented a bunch of your favorite stuff, and you might not even know his name. Consider just two of the many adaptations of his work: Blade Runner and Minority Report. The first defined the very look of science fiction for at least 20 years; the second one did the same, but for the next 20 years. The author of some 40-odd novels and well over a hundred short stories, Philip K. Dick was a prolific visionary who influenced just about every pop-culture vision of "the future" you've ever seen. He's also influenced a lot of bad stuff. (Ever see The Adjustment Bureau?) Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams is a clumsily titled Twilight Zone–style anthology series based on his work that's also a good distillation of Dick's track record in being adapted: Some stories are good, some are bad, some are weird, and one just might be one of the best things you've seen in a very long time.

The odd thing about Philip K. Dick's work is that it's so sprawling that it's hard to articulate a neat through line that encapsulates what each episode of Electric Dreams is trying to get at. Joke about Black Mirror all you want—people understand that it's about technology, specifically, the kind you use every day now, even though it frightens you a bit. The producers of Electric Dreams have settled on "humanity" and "the nature of reality" as the series' focus, which is...quite vague! Thankfully, each episode has a hook in the form of some talent you've seen before and love: an actor, a director, a writer, someone you really want to see in or never could imagine doing a Philip K. Dick story, from Dee Rees to Janelle Monáe to Steve Buscemi.

Every episode of Electric Dreams is absolutely gorgeous, unafraid to go wide and showing great restraint in the accoutrements of science fiction. One of the very best episodes, "The Commuter," isn't really a science-fiction story at all but a bittersweet short film about an old man who works at a train station in England and encounters a woman who asks for a ticket to a train station that doesn't exist. Another, "KAO," written and directed by Dee Rees, takes place in the totalitarian high-tech mega-nation of MexUsCan, but its main character, Philbert, lives a recognizably blue-collar life in a cramped apartment with tacky wood paneling and well-worn furniture constantly beset by holographic advertisements. And then sometimes, like in "Real Life," things do go full Blade Runner, because, well, this is all based on the work of the guy who invented Blade Runner.

In some ways, anthology series are the perfect response to the current state of television: a bunch of standalone episodes that don't require you to follow yet another complicated season-long plot. But in others, they're extremely vulnerable to falling through the cracks. When every episode is a short film—and you have ten of varying quality to watch—there's no tug to return that a good cliffhanger would give you. Electric Dreams has its fair share of shortcomings. It's weirdly consistent in undermining itself with endings that are terribly on the nose or over-explained, and genre fiction's longstanding fascination with Dick's work means you've probably seen a lot of these ideas before elsewhere. But at its best, it's genuinely fascinated with people. How there are countless forces constantly pushing them to isolate themselves, how our visions of the future are often just visions of our fears, and how having the hubris to think you truly understand humanity will lead to your undoing. You probably won't like every episode, but you'll definitely find one you'll never forget.

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